Dylan Tweney wrote a fantastic article on Wired.com about hackerspaces in the US. NYCResistor was profiled along with Hack DC and Noisebridge. A fun and interesting read…

While many movements begin in obscurity, hackers are unanimous about the birth of U.S. hacker spaces: August, 2007 when U.S. hackers Bre Pettis, Nicholas Farr, Mitch Altman and others visited Germany on a geeky field trip called Hackers on a Plane.

“It’s almost a Fight Club for nerds,” says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York…

So, both of my grandfathers were engineers in their own way. My grandfather on my father’s side (Ed Joyce) was a mechanic in the merchant marine during “the” war. My grandfather on my mother’s side (Ed Latimer.. what are the odds?) worked with the army air corps at one of their Radar Research Facilities in Arizona. He later worked as a foreman with Ma Bell for basically the rest of his life… One of his past times was curb collecting electronics and repairing them. Thanks to him every kid in my home had a black and white tube tv growing up… which was a little odd since color televisions were 20 years old at that point =P. Anyways when he passed he left some old electronics stuff that was passed off to me. A pretty awesome old tube tester, bunch of tubes, and various ancient components… but also some old service news magazines. Which had articles on how to service televisions and radios, and discussion of the technology of the time. Pretty amazing stuff. A window into a bygone era so to speak. All the documents are now public domain according to my research so enjoy!

Confused/excited about all the cool things happening in Arduino-land lately? Well, luckily for you we’ve taken a look at the various Arduino families and blogged them over at the MakerBot Industries blog.

The result? They’re each awesome and it’s pretty easy to pick which one is right for you.

Monochrom will be coming to NYCResistor to give a performance and bring the joys of Communism to NYC. Having just launched their propaganda rich communist video game, they are now on a worldwide tour to bring the joys of the USSR to those of us in Brooklyn who are smart enough to do what Monochrom tells us.

The performance is free and will start promptly on March 21st at 7:05 PM.

I’m going to be teaching folks how to solder and each student will be provided with a TV-B-Gone kit to solder together.

You’ll learn the basics of using molten metal to make electronics projects come to life. You’ll also learn some basic techniques for removing soldered components. If you’ve always wanted to get into creating electronics, this is the class for you!

As part of our grand plan to Take Over The World® we’re happy to announce a new and exciting development! A few of us (Adam Mayer, Bre Pettis, and Zach Hoeken) have formed a new company called MakerBot Industries to do awesome things. What is MakerBot Industries? Well, we make open source hardware. To be more specific, we make robots that make things! If you really wanna get into the nitty gritty, we created a RepRap derivative called CupCake CNC which is a cheap, easy to build 3D printer!

If you’ve been at NYC Resistor lately, you may have seen random prototyped bits laying around. We’ve done pretty much all of our R&D for this machine using our laser cutter and the other various tools we have at the hack space here. I’m personally really happy to see something like this blossom out of our shared space, and I’m looking forward to hacking on this machine much more in the future. If anyone wants to try and design a 3D model, we’d be more than happy to try and print it out for you. We’ll have the machine fired up and printing stuff out for craft night this Thursday, and hopefully all the Thursdays after that as well!